Return of the Tutorial: Escape from Skull Island - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 109

to ballerina to basketball player. Because this is a set-up for a topic and
not an actual design document, I'll spare you the details of how all of
this happens. Suffice to say each one behaves as you think they might.
Of course, from your reading, you should now know that assuming
that players will know what these classes are is a mistake, and assum-
ing that players will know how they play is also a mistake. For this
reason, we are going to design learning experiences for them that are
endogenous, non-threatening, and stay in accordance with all of the
tutorials we have seen throughout the topic.
After selecting their three characters, players begin the game by
pressing a begin button. Play is in real time, similar to contempo-
rary dungeon-crawling titles. Players will encounter enemies who
will attack them on-sight in various ways with projectile, melee, and
magic attacks. When a member of the party dies, they are dead and
out of the game. When the party is wiped out, the game is over (see
Figure 7.2). To this end, the game is a hard-as-nails type rogue-like,
but still an action role-playing game, as enemies do not “wait” for
the player to act. Of course, players are going to have no idea what I
mean by ARPG or rogue-like, so we are going to create learning so
that even if they don't know anything, they can still have a great time.

Select characters

Start game

Crawl dungeon

Go deeper Character death

Floor 10? All dead?

No No Ye s

Ye s

Win!

Game over

Figure 7.2 Skull Island flow chart. (Screenshot courtesy of Matthew White.)